For Max Verstappen, the 2022 season has been a straight road to victory, with little to no deviations. But P2 in the World Drivers’ Championship has been up for grabs and continues to do so, with Charles Leclerc of Ferrari and Sergio Perez of Red Bull being the closest contenders to get that by the end of the season.

For Charles Leclerc though, P2 is not something he would stop at. The Monegasque has been one of the most brilliant drivers this season, with some outstanding performances in Australia and Austria. However, he currently stands on 275 points which looks minuscule in front of Max Verstappen’s 416.

Those numbers are quite deceptive. Leclerc has been a victim of a number of strategy fails and mistakes from his team, which has put him in his current position. He might not have won the WDC even if those incidents did not occur but the gap between him and Verstappen would have been much smaller.

Earlier in the season, Ferrari President John Elkann laid out Ferrari’s plans for grabbing the world title. But for a driver of Leclerc’s talent, the timeline set by Elkann is too far in the future.

Talking to Motorsport.com, Leclerc said “I want to be World Champion in 2023. I know the president, John Elkann, said it is a goal to be achieved by 2026, but I cannot accept this deadline. I am very impatient. I will prepare and do everything possible to become World Champion in 2023.” [Translated using Google]

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Ferrari has been among the fastest cars this season and on some occasions the fastest car of the day. They have been plagued by issues that are easily reversible. But will they be able to do it?

Ferrari and Charles Leclerc undo progress in Mexico City

While the Ferrari car has been one of the faster cars on the tracks, especially in comparison to Mercedes’ W13, it looked like a pale shadow of itself in its disappointing performance in Mexico.

In Mexico, the Ferrari drivers finished P5 and P6 on Sunday. The performance of the car was poor right from FP1 to race weekend, and it showed.

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After the race, a disappointed Leclerc said, “The thing that hurts is that I feel we’ve maximized everything (on race day) and even though we’ve done that, we are one minute away from Max, a huge difference.”

“We need to look into that and make our bad days better, mostly because whenever we have a bad day on the Sunday it seems to be a really bad day.”

Sainz was also in a similar mood after the race as he said, “With the altitude we knew we were going to lose quite a bit of performance. More than what we expected and we were just off the pace.”

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For Ferrari to be a real title challenger next year will require making changes. Changes to the strategy team are arguably the easiest to point out.